The exciting new documentary whose upcoming release we announced in a September 8 article is now here. 9/11 in the Academic Community was released for purchase on October 8, after having won an award for “Documentary Achievement” at the University of Toronto Film Festival earlier this year. At a manageable running time of 75 minutes, with a title designed to appeal to its target audience, and by avoiding hot-button phrases such as “9/11 Truth,” the film has an excellent chance of slipping out of the conspiracy theorist jacket and making inroads into the American and Canadian intellectual communities.

This is certainly a film that needed to be made. With few exceptions, there has been a deafening silence in the classrooms of North American campuses regarding many obvious and undeniable facts that undermine the official account of 9/11. If the faculty and students at institutions of higher learning cannot question and even contradict what we have been told by media and government about the “crime of the century” without being called “conspiracy theorists,” then what has become of the academic community? Those who wrote the U.S. Constitution and defeated the British Empire’s dominion over the American colonies well understood that the spirit of free inquiry and an understanding of history were key to a properly functioning democratic republic. Even with those freedoms and values, Benjamin Franklin famously predicted that it would be difficult for us to “keep it.” Nothing less is at stake with regard to the issues covered in this film.

9/11 in the Academic Community is more watchable than most “9/11 truth” films. One of its biggest strengths is that all of its speakers express criticisms of the way that the 9/11 account was advanced and how it’s been treated in the 12 years since then – mostly without sounding angry.